Educating the Imagination

 Imagination seems important to me as a writer yet something never really mentioned by philosophers. Why we need a new kind of education: Imagination Studies advocates promoting imagination:

In the same way that the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky revealed the hidden unconscious biases of our minds, and indirectly ushered in the entirely new field of bias studies, it is time to acknowledge the vast mythopoetic or imaginative aspects of mind that shape our thinking and sense-making processes.

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After years of working on the problem, and countless conversations, it seems to me that what is required is a third path: to enter the chasm itself, or descend deeper into a submerged mythopoetic cognition, and develop an entirely new way of understanding learning that embraces the true engine of the mind – imagination.

 And what is the imagination?

But what is imagination? Imagination is as imagination does. If we treat the imagination as merely a faculty of the mind, then we will miss the dynamic action-oriented aspect: it is part of the organism’s pragmatic attempt to get maximum grip on its changing environment. We are also likely to misunderstand the way it recruits from many brain-processing areas, such as perception, emotions, motivational/conative areas, memory, image representation, executive planning, and so on – ie, it is distributed. But though it would be wrong to view imagination as only a faculty of the mind, it is indeed a brain-based (embodied) system of capacities and applications. It has an involuntary mode (ie, mind-wandering and dreaming) and a voluntary mode (governed by conscious goal-direction).

I will shoot my mouth off and say that imagination is what got Columbus to go west, what caused Watt to invent the steam engine, what led to the Wright brothers to show up at Kitty Hawk, pushed human beings into outer space, gave Steve Jobs the idea for the iPhone. You can add others to the list. Imagination keeps the human race going.

sch 10/17/22